CachyOS is King Now, and the Distro World Settles

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Last time we had our regular checkpoint was in June 2026 and you may recall we observed that CachyOS was not only in the 1st spot on ProtonDB for desktop distros, but kept growing further, eating Arch Linux’s own share. So how have things changed since then?

Before we take a look at the chart, the usual disclaimer that you love:

  • This may not be representative of all types of Linux users. I’m sure this is not what your AWS architect uses on EC2, nor what you installed for your grandmother to avoid being the IT troubleshooter in your family.
  • This may not be completely representative of all Linux gamers either. But I’d wage this is actually a good predictor where the market is going to shift. We saw first that Manjaro was getting the boot here first, before going under pretty much everywhere.
  • There may be some additional biases, due to whoever used ProtonDB at some point in time.
  • Flatpak is NOT a distro (you don’t need to tell me, I am quite aware), but that’s what Steam reports when it’s running on Flatpak, and Flatpak being distro independent we report it as a separate environment, if that makes sense. Feel free to ignore it if you wish.
  • Arch Linux is Arch Linux on the desktop. The Steam Deck’s OS is reported as HoloISO, not Arch Linux, so stop trying to claim that Arch is first because of the Steam Deck! This is mainly data reported from desktop PCs, so no, SteamOS is not a thing at the moment on such machines. This may change as Valve starts providing official support beyond the Steam Deck. There are Steam Deck-only reports on ProtonDB, but we don’t use them here in this chart.
  • We have no relationship whatsoever with any the devs who develop the distros mentioned in the list. Well, Podiki is actually involved with GUIX, but sadly it’s not nearly as popular as it should.

Here’s what you came for! You might want to click on the picture to enlarge it, because it’s small.

CachyOS is now settling at a comfortable first position, and we can see that things are more or less stable across the board.

The New World Order

If this is our new baseline, this does not mean that the work on distros is stopping at all. On the contrary, everyone keeps pushing forward to ensure they stay on top, or maintain their relevancy at least.

Recent CachyOS updates

There was a new series of udpates for CachyOS that shipped on August 9, 2026. Those include:

  • Shelly package manager rewritten from C# to Zig. Native binaries, lower memory, faster startup.
  • Shelly desktop: first-run welcome screen, list/grid browsing, AUR PKGBUILD previews with build output, Utilities page for db sync/cache/orphan removal.
  • Shelly CLI rebuilt with integrated repo/AUR search, combined update checks for repos/AUR/AppImages/Flatpaks, TOML backup import/export. Optional shelly-flatpak-backend package added.
  • Cachy-Update rebased to Arch-Update v4.x. Systray applet rewritten in Rust. New --check --enable option, configurable TrayUpdatesPerPage, default check interval raised to 6 hours.
  • chwd kernel-manager backend rewritten from C++ to Rust and integrated into chwd-kernel.
  • Handheld detection improved via board_name pattern matching. Bulgarian localization added.
  • CLI installer refactored with experimental Server Edition installation profiles.
  • Installer desktop changes: Hyprland now uses noctalia-greeter instead of SDDM, Cinnamon switched to lightdm-slick-greeter, gvfs-dnssd added to GNOME, cosmic-monitor added to COSMIC.
  • CachyOS-Welcome DNS rework: speed-test based server ranking works correctly.
  • New Noctalia (native Wayland desktop shell) variants for mango and niri. Noctalia v5 support for Hyprland dotfiles. Nord KDE theme updated for Plasma 6.7.
  • cachyos-rate-mirrors now uses CachyOS mirrorlist API for ranking.

All of these updates require no manual intervention.

Bazzite very strong

As you can see Bazzite is also gaining some ground, and it’s not surprise as they are moving very fast to provide new kernels, new libraries, and general updates as fast as possible.

  • June 2026 update: Kernel 7.0.9 on stable, Valve VRAM patch set functional on KDE & GNOME, Mesa 26.1, Bazaar 0.8.1, Nvidia-open 610, Xbox controller fixes.
  • July 13 2026 44.20260713: kernel jump to 7.1.3, fresh Mesa graphics code, updated Nvidia drivers for Steam Deck / ROG Ally / handhelds.
  • July 16 2026 stable: Linux 7.1.3 with refreshed Mesa, Nvidia and Wayland stack updates plus new Razer peripheral support.

There is a lot in testing for August as well so it looks like people are not taking too much time off. Overall Bazzite appears to be fairly resilient despite the drama of the first half of 2026.

The Rest

Not a lot of movement and not a lot of news from other distros to be honest. Pop_OS! has moved to a new base (24.04) but is still 2 years late on the latest Ubuntu (26.04 is the new stable) and we have no idea when they will be able to catch up. At this stage it looks like less and less people actually care, as the distro flirts with the 2% threshold.

The only remarkable thing is the ranking is the progressive reduction of Flatpak usage for Steam. More and more distros maintain their own meta package for Steam and it looks like less and less people are relying on a container approach to use it. This is expected if more people are using rolling release distros.

Distro Popularity by Origin

Another way to look at this data is to aggregate the distro by origin instead of individual brands.

So we get (focusing only on the major distros, which accounts for most of the usage share anyway):

  • Arch-based: 26.1 + 13.8 + 3.2 + 1.5 = 44.6 %
  • Fedora-based: 10.1 + 9.2 + 4.4 = 23.7 %
  • Debian-based: 8 + 6.7 + 2.5 + 1.9 = 19.1 %

Arch-based distros are still leading by far and large. There is not much change vs the ranking based on origin that we did back in June 2026. Again, same message as earlier: things look rather stable now.

It looks like we are set for a new equilibrium, unless a new entrant tries to take CachyOS on.